Having no special psephological expertise, I have no confident ideas about how the election will turn out. I think that President Bush will win, possibly by a surprising margin, for three reasons. First, it seems unlikely that, in the middle of a war, the electorate will dump the commander-in-chief in favor of someone who, according to polls, is considered by a substantial majority to be less fit for the office. Second, the economy is in good shape. Numbers no better than the current ones guaranteed Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996. Finally, polls in close elections usually underpredict the performance of conservative candidates. We saw that in Australia, a country where accurate polling is much easier than here, just last month. The race was, said the pollsters, excruciatingly tight, with an edge to the Labour Party. Right-wing pundit Tim Blair was not alone in his pessimism. In the event, the right-of-center governing coalition won nearly 53 percent of the two-party vote, gained five seats in the House of Representatives and won control of the Senate for the first time in over a quarter-century.
Regardless of the outcome, however, American history will go on, and conservatives will need to cope with the future. (In our topsy-turvy new millennium, it is liberals who dwell incessantly on the past and angrily yearn for the restoration of a romanticized golden age of peace, prosperity and political correctitude.) Here, then, are what I regard as the most urgent tasks that face our country over the next several years.
First, needless to say, is to fight the War on Terror, preferably with enhanced aggressiveness. A Bush victory will be a superlative opportunity, because it will, at least for the moment, demoralize anti-Americans around the world and will suggest to waverers that waiting for the United States to retreat into an isolationist shell is not a profitable strategy. A Kerry win will have the opposite impact, of course, but it need not be fatal. George W. Bush will remain President for three more months. I’m sure that he won’t follow the Clinton course of making things as difficult as possible for his successor. Instead, he will most likely ease the way for a Kerry Administration by cleaning out Fallujah and other Islamofascist pockets in Iraq and making sure that the elections scheduled for January can take place on schedule. After that, a President Kerry will be on his own, but he will swiftly learn what he doubtless already knows in the nuances of his mind: that France, Germany and the U.N. won’t bail out the “hyperpower” and can’t be appeased by any concession that it is politically feasible for an American President to yield. Though he doesn’t want to and will do it badly, he would be fated to be as much a unilateralist war President as his predecessor. (David Frum made this point excellently yesterday, but it should be obvious. My 20-year-old niece has been saying the same to her college roommates.) The Left will in that case come to detest John Kerry as much as it once did Lyndon Johnson. It will be up to the Right to offer intellectual and moral support.
Second, the economy cannot be ignored. No one today, thankfully, is as fatuously optimistic as during the Clinton years, when the conventional wisdom seemed to be that the Business Cycle had been repealed and unending prosperity was a natural state of affairs. The problem is to find the right tonic to mitigate the fluxes. If one looks at the economic facts of the Clinton period, the one that stands out is that, from 1994 through 1998, federal spending declined in relation to the size of the economy, thus putting more economic decisions in the hands of utility-maximizing private parties and spurring expansion. Then the spending tide began to turn, and recession was in the air by the latter half of 2000, when the GDP contracted for a quarter, struggled through a couple more and definitively declined in early 2001. The Bush tax cuts provided the stimulus for a recovery, but the long-term way to limit the number and severity of downturns is spending discipline, which has not been a prominent feature of either party’s platform in recent years. Bringing rationality to discretionary spending, much less entitlements, is politically a daunting task, but an essential one.
Third, President Bush (assuming that is still President after next January) appears to be willing, though he may have trouble being able, to address our greatest long-term economic problem: liabilities for Social Security and Medicare. The current system is demographically unsustainable. It was designed for an era when the nonworking elderly were a small fraction of the population, not an emerging majority. Barring the discovery of an elixir of youth that enables us all to continue laboring productively into our 90’s (and is that what we really desire?), the day will come when retirees will have no choice but to live on their own accumulated capital. We can either prepare for that day by gradually converting Social Security and Medicare into private savings programs, or we can be grasshopper liberals, wait for the collapse and blame capitalism. Old Europe is on course for the latter, Latin America (oddly enough) for the former. It may be a century before the results are fully visible, but what they will be is scarcely in doubt. The United States has yet to make its choice.
Finally, it is essential to attend to the American democratic process itself. With luck tomorrow’s predictably massive fraud won’t tip the balance, but John Fund’s Stealing Elections assembles enough data to alarm any citizen who isn’t himself engaged in ballot theft. Congress made stabs at reform after the Florida contretemps, but they were worse than inadequate, as demonstrated already by widespread phantom voter registration – Philadelphia alone has 60,000 more voters on the rolls than citizens old enough to vote – and sure to be confirmed tomorrow. At a minimum, there ought to be a national data base of registrations, so that, for instance, 27,000 people cannot continue to be active voters in both Ohio and Florida, coupled with a requirement of photo ID at the polling place. In my eyes, the only motive that a politician can have for opposing those minimal measures is a belief that he or his party benefits from fraud and has the right to continue to do so.
It would also be nice to end the erosion of the secret ballot. Balloting by mail has become so commonplace that there can be no assurance in many states that the choices marked on the ballot represent the true opinions of the nominal voters. It may mean little to independent-minded denizens of the blogosphere that a domineering parent, spouse, social worker, employer, shop steward or other person with influence over the lives of others is in a position to demand to see how those others vote. Not too long ago, the effect of overt and covert pressure was confined by the fact that almost all ballots were cast on Election Day out of the sight of anyone but the individual citizen, who could solemnly promise to mark A and pick B instead. Have we so utterly forgotten why the 19th Century reformers insisted that the privacy of the voting booth could not be optional?
Oh, let’s also not forget another quaint 19th Century notion: freedom of speech. REPEAL McCAIN-FEINGOLD!. A democracy whose government controls what citizens can say for and against political candidates will not remain a democracy for long.
There are many other issues that can occupy our attention, but these are, I think, the big ones. Many Americans will prefer to shunt them aside; that is a way of pretending that the future will inevitably be sunny and serene. It is the spirit that animates the leadership of the Democratic Party, an illusion that our country and our civilization can no longer afford.
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